Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) is in the process of a major capital investment plan to radically improve and modernise its estate. The £55 million new Business School and Student Hub, opened in 2012, was the university’s most significant new building project since the 1960s, replacing an outdated building elsewhere in the city. Designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley, the dramatic new building provides 23,000 sq m of new space for 5,000 students and 250 staff and achieved BREEAM Excellent for sustainability and marked a major milestone in the ongoing transformation of the university’s estate.
“The Business School encompasses formal teaching spaces, while The Hub offers a vibrant street café ambience where students trade ideas and knowledge. It is the antithesis of the archetypal cloistered halls of academia……Our resulting designs evolved in response to a number of questions. How could a building physically manifest an expression of the University’s ambitious, extrovert attitude? And how could we create a study environment akin to the workplaces students would eventually inhabit? The answer was to create an environment that was part corporate HQ, part university.” (Feilden Clegg Bradley)
The architects collaborated with the artist Martin Richman in the design concept of a glass crystal with a façade that refracts and reflects light to animate the inside, changing with different aspects of the sun and light outside through the year and through the day.
Inside, the building is planned around three 12 m wide flexible floor plates separated by two atria, also 12 m wide, the taller of which is occupied by the Business School, the smaller by the Sudent Hub. Formal teaching and informal social learning spaces are positioned across the building at all levels, reinforcing that this is a student-focussed building.
Sustainability is a key objective of the university and the architects responded to this with a design that includes a ground source heat pump for heating and cooling, heat from areas that require cooling, such as IT rooms, being used elsewhere in the building or to pre-heat the domestic hot water supply, a 1,000msq photovoltaic array on the roof and chilled water pipe-work cast into the pre-cast concrete floor slabs to minimise the use of mechanical equipment and also make use of the building’s thermal mass.
The design achieves a building which is a landmark on the campus as it develops further and internally is light, transparent and visually permeable.
“The optical properties of the building, where light is refracted and reflected into bands of colour, projecting into and out from the building, has truly created the jewel in MMU’s crown.” (John Brooks, Vice-Chancellor MMU)
